Kim

hmmm...I certainly feel for you in this case. I'm thankful for all the computer nerds at Comcast and Belkin that always seem to be able to fix my problems. I've been where you are and it isn't fun. The one problem I couldn't understand in your post was this one;

I would be browsing and it would work fine for about 5 minutes, then all of the sudden the browser wouldn't work anymore and I couldn't update anything.

When you say the browser would stop working do you mean your connection went down? Or you couldn't surf on the computer that was wireless?

If you mean the wireless computer wouldn't surf, check on this; On the lower right hand corner of your screen there should be a little monitor icon with three little lines that represent your wireless connection.

If you hover your mouse over it you'll see the name of your wireless network, speed and your signal strength. If you have anything less than "excellent" as your connection strength that could be causing a problem and making your browser die. Something in your area could be interfering with your wireless router, things like a tv or cordless phone or large piece of metal. What you do is you go into your router and change the number that your wireless router is broadcasting on. It may take you days or weeks to figure out which to broadcast on until you get the best one. You may also have to move the computer that the router is connected to another area to give you a better signal.

As far as the other parts about security and firewalls, that stuff is way too technical for me, but your router comes with a firewall built in and if you have windows XP you should also have a firewall. So having one that you went out and bought may be a little over kill, unless you can get someone to come to your house and set it all up so nothing interfers with each other.

I think there is a computer forum here, you may want to check it out (if you haven't already) and see what the people there have to say.

Good luck.

Yea, I know it doesn't make sense. It didn't make sense to all the tech support people either. Basically, my connection is always on and on excellent strength, no problem there. But, after a couple minutes browsing the internet, the pages would quit loading. It would start acting like it got disconnected, even though the connection was still there. It was first suggested that this was a firewall issue, so I uninstalled the firewall that came with the computer. Still no help. It was then suggested that maybe it was spyware so I checked for that. There were a couple things, but after they were removed I still had the problem. I thought it had something to do with the modem I had (tech support for it was less than stellar) so I took it back and got another one. And still had the problem! This modem comes with its own firewall so I went in and turned it off and tried again. This time I was finally able to keep browsing, and also noticed that for the first time Java installed and was working. So maybe that was it? Or the firewall? I don't know. As long as it is working now I won't worry about it. But what a headache!

Kim